America's Nazi Secret: An Insider's History (47 page)

²
Gehlen’s operations are described in E. H. Cookridge,
Gehlen: Spy of the Century
(Random House, 1972).

³
Ibid., pp. 203-04.

⁴
The best account of the history of Byelorussia is Nicholas P. Vakar, Belorussia: The Making of a Nation (Harvard University Press, 1956).

⁵
For post-World War I activities in Byelorussia and émigré politics, I have relied upon V. Kalush,
In the Service of the People for a Free Belorussia: Biographical Notes on Professor Radislav Ostrowski
, which was published in Byelorussian in London in 1964. A reliable source indicates that this work is actually an autobiography written by Ostrowsky under a pen name. It will be cited below as Ostrowsky’s biography.

⁶
Polish oppression in Byelorussia is discussed in Stephan Horak,
Poland and Her National Minorities, 1919-1939
(Vantage Press, 1961), pp. 170-80.

⁷
According to “Parliament Rzeczypospolitej Polskiej” (
Parliament of the Republic of Poland
)
1919-1927
, edited by Professors Henryk Miscicki and Woldzimierz Dzwonkowski, published by Lucjan Zlotnicki for the Polish Government in Warsaw in 1928, “Sobolevsky was deputy to the Polish Parliament in 1926, representing the Byelorussian Socialist Party and this was a Communist Party.” Ironically, allegations about Sobolewsky’s Communist background were previously known to the FBI. See letter of December 21, 1950, from J. Edgar Hoover to Chief, Security Division, U.S. Department of State.

⁸
According to Ostrowsky’s biography, pp. 28-29, he was accused of receiving funds from Bolshevik sources to finance subversive activities of the Gramada.

⁹
The Vilna trials are described in Henryk Frankle’s
Poland: The Struggle for Power, 1772-1939
(Lindsey Drummond Ltd., 1946), pp. 155-56.

¹⁰
The Gramada leaders who fled to the Soviet Union were executed on Solovky Island as Polish spies. Union Calendar No. 929, 83rd Congress, Second Session, “Communist Takeover and Occupation of Belorussia,” Washington, 1955, p. 14.

¹¹
For Russian emigré politics in the pre-World War II period see Geoffrey Bailey,
The Conspirators
(Harper & Bros., 1960).

¹²
For an overview of the SS structure, see Heinz Hohne,
The Order of the Death’s Head
(Coward-McCann, 1970).

¹³
According to the Nazi historical work
Weissrutheniein Volk und Land by Eugen Freiherr von Engelhardt
(Volk und Reich Verlag, 1943), the leading representatives of the “Byelorussian Union of University Students” before World War II were: Abramchyk, M. (Paris, France); Cherepukan, I. (Chicago, US); Kasmovich, D. (Belgrade, Yugoslavia); Rusak, V. (Prague, Czechoslovakia); Tsikota (Rome, Italy); Vasileuski, K. (Ghent, Belgium); Waronka, J. (Chicago, U.S.); Zakharka, V. (Prague, Czechoslovakia). Over half of the persons on this list became Nazi collaborators during the war.

¹⁴
The Self-Help Committee was described by Stanislaw Hrynkievich as an agency that “provided help, mostly financial, for needy White Ruthenian subjects, after they had been investigated and found ‘worthy’ by Nazi standards.”
Interrogation Report, No. 2
, Third Army, May 12, 1945.

¹⁵
For an overview of Byelorussia from the SS perspective, see “Tatigkeiten & Lageberichte No. 2651,” pp. 29-34, microfilm frames nos. 226392-397.

¹⁶
In his biography, pp. 34-35, Ostrowsky admits that in the summer of 1940 he was already in contact with the Byelorussian committees at Warsaw, Poznan, and Berlin. His biography names the leaders of those various committees, many of them former students of Ostrowsky. In a confidential interview with a Western intelligence agency, Ostrowsky admitted that the work of the committees was secretly funded by the Gestapo.

¹⁷
Extensive documentation concerning the role of the SS Einsatzgruppen in conducting mass executions is set forth in Raoul Hilberg, The Destruction of the European Jews (Octagon, 1978).

¹⁸
Background on Dr. Six is in Cookridge, op. cit., p. 242.

¹⁹
A list of the Byelorussian guides and the particular cities to which they were assigned by the SS is contained in interview M-34 (GBV).

Chapter Two

²⁰
For an overview of Operation Barbarossa see Alexander Werth,
Russia at War, 1941-1945
(Dutton, 1964), pp. 131-58. The major work on the German occupation of the Soviet Union is Alexander Dallin,
German Rule in Russia 1941-1945
(St. Martin’s Press, 1957).

²¹
Ostrowsky’s biography mentions that the Byelorussian National Committee in Warsaw furnished forty members who were assigned to administrative jobs under the Germans. It was Ostrowsky who devised the system of putting them in pairs.

²²
The recruitment of pro-German administrators from among the Byelorussian collaborators is described in “Tatigkeiten & Lageberichte No. 1,” National Archives Nuremberg Collection Document No. 265 1.

²³
According to captured German documents in the National Archives, the local collaborators were required to register the Jews with provisional visas. The “purpose of the visa: possibility of elimination of all undesirables.” Document of 20 July 1941, Military Administration Group, Army Group Center, National Archives Microfilm Section T120, Roll 2533, frames 29282G821.

²⁴
Captured Nazi documents clearly establish that the Jews in the ghettos were under the control of the civilian police. Report No. 70, National Archives Microfilm Section T175, Roll 233, frames 2722148-152.

²⁵
The connection of the collaborators to the civil administration under the Germans is described in SS document Ereignesmeldungen No. 97 (1941), National Archives Microfilm Section T175, Roll 233, frames 2722679-688.

²⁶
The effect of the Nazi instructions to the collaborators can be seen by comparing Report No. 27 (19 July 1941), “Greater Cooperation Is Expected Considering the Catching of … Intelligence, Jews, etc.” with the next week’s report (24 July 1941), “In Minsk, the whole Jewish Intelligentsia Has Been Liquidated.” National Archives Microfilm Section T175, Roll 233, frames 2721633-637.

²⁷
According to captured SS records, White Ruthenian collaborators were appointed to positions in the civil administration in all cities touched by the Einsatzgruppen (the mobile killing units). Ereignesmeldungen No. 43, National Archives Microfilm Section T177, Roll 233, frames 272 1772-782.

²⁸
Although many of the Byelorussians claimed that they were elected to their offices, captured German documents clearly established that it was they who installed the collaborators as mayors. National Archives Microfilm Section T120, Roll 2533, frames 292820-830.

²⁹
The connection between the Einsatzgruppen and the provisional administration established in Byelorussia is discussed repeatedly in several captured SS documents contained in the National Archives. See, for example, National Archives Microfilm Group T175, Roll 233, Report No. 27, frame 2721570; Report No. 21, frames 272149s91; Report No. 21, frame 2721496; Report No. 36, frames 2721692-93; Report No. 90, frames 2722485-87; Report No. 97, frame 2722688. It should be emphasized that these are the actual weekly reports from the mobile killing units themselves.

³⁰
Stankievich is discussed in Volume 5 of the Nuremberg documents series (Red Set).

³¹
Stankievich’s role as mayor of Borissow is described in the following German documents and SS reports: Microfilm Group T194, Roll 235, frames 429433; Microfilm Group T454, Roll 26, frame 71; Microfilm Group T315, Roll 1586, frame 359; and Nuremberg document PS-3047.

³²
Evidently, Ehoff was pardoned by the Communists after the war. According to the Soviet propaganda booklet “How They Served the People,” p. 34, “David Ehof, a Russianized German from the Volga Region and one of the active participants of the bloody events at Borisov in 1941, now lives in A Free Settlement in the Soviet Union….”

³³
Soennecken’s report is in the Congressional Record Appendix, August 7, 1948. Nuremberg Document No. 3047-PS.

³⁴
The role of the White Russian police in the systematic slaughter of the Byelorussian ghettos is described in the English section of the 550-page Yiddish-language book
Sefer Steibtz-Swerzene
[Memorial Book of Stolpce] (Israel, 1964). According to Jewish eyewitnesses, the method of extermination was quite systematized:

For two days they dug a pit that was 150 meters long and 2% meters deep. The Jews were loaded on lorries. Those who refused to climb up were beaten savagely or killed on the spot.

The shrieks of the poor people split the heavens. The lorries were driven by local White Russian drivers. Beside the pit stood Germans, Letts and White Russian police with machine-guns. The Jews were ordered to take their clothes off. Men, women and children stood naked. Their belongings, their rings, their money and everything else was taken away from them. These were placed in a row on the edge of the pit and the machine-guns began chattering and killing. Living people also fell into the pits which were then covered with a layer of sand.

³⁵
The
Encyclopedia Judaica
lists hundreds, perhaps thousands, of small Byelorussian and Ukrainian villages that were subjected to the same treatment.

³⁶
On November 1, 1941, General Wilhelm Kube wrote a letter to the Reichs Kommissar for the Eastern Territories, Gauleiter Heinrich Lohse, at Riga, protesting the Slutsk massacre:

Peace and order cannot be maintained in White Ruthenia with methods of that sort. To bury seriously wounded people alive who work their way out of their graves again, is such a base and filthy act that this incident as such should be reported to the Fuehrer and Reichs Marshal. The civil administration of White Ruthenia makes very strenuous efforts to win the population over to Germany in accordance with the instructions of the Fuehrer. These efforts cannot be brought in harmony with the methods described herein….

³⁷
Paromchyk Galina,
The Tragedy of Koldychevo
, from the library of the newspaper “Voice of the Motherland” (Minsk, 1962), discusses the 1962 war crimes trial in Baranovitche, Byelorussia, of four accused murderers. The book also contains detailed allegations against Ostrowsky, Franz Kushel, Boris Ragulia, Sergei Gutyrchik, and Victor Zhdan, all of whom were alleged to be living in the United States.

³⁸
Solomon Schiadow, Memoirs, FBI files.

³⁹
Vakar, op. cit. Chapter 12, contains an objective account of the Nazi occupation of Byelorussia.

⁴⁰
Many of the collaborators had religious backgrounds. The Orthodox theological schools had lower fees than grammar schools in Byelorussia, although their graduates were restricted to academic careers at the theological seminaries. Up to 1906, theological scholars were barred from the universities (Ostrowsky, biography, pp. 1cb11).

⁴¹
On partisan warfare, see Vakar, op. cit.; Werth, op. cit., pp. 710-26; and V. K. Kiselev,
Partizanskaya Razvedka
(Partisan Intelligence Work) (Minsk, 1980).

⁴²
Ostrowsky admitted that he had no idea whether the Communists in his administration were secretly planted by the NKVD. However, both the SS and the German administration agreed that the shortage of trained collaborators made the hiring of Communist officials necessary (Ostrowsky’s biography, pp. 44-45).

⁴³
Vakar, op. cit., chap. 12.